Let's Rank All The Queens Of The Stone Age Albums!
****Originally published on 12/29/22, this ranking has been updated as of 1/16/24 to include In Times New Roman.
A complicated story, a complicated frontman, a unique and legendary band. For those of you who don’t know, QOTSA rose out of the ashes of the quintessential stoner metal band - the mighty KYUSS. Kyuss recorded a few of the heaviest / trippiest / grooviest albums ever with plenty of Sabbath influence but in turn kickstarted a whole new subgenre of rock in doing so. But similar to the Velvet Underground their influence grew after they called it quits and Josh Homme took things in a different direction with his new band.
Homme has always been the leader and front man but the whole thing has often felt like a collective in a great way, with some permanent members coming and going, semi-permanent members, quasi-permanent members, regular guests, semi-frequent guests and various other stop-by-ers and sometime collaboraters. Hehe…. And it pretty much all works. It’s heavy, it’s trippy, it’s creepy, it’s quirky and sometimes it sounds like the soundtrack to Halloween, but it never sounds like Kyuss. Actually it rarely sounds like anything but QOTSA and that’s part of what is thrilling about this band. Often you can’t put a finger on why you love some of these weirdest of weird creations, and you often can’t understand why it’s so heavy when it’s so……not heavy. Sometimes the balls required to lay down a track that just pauses with what is basically just a droning note in the middle of the song for about 40 seconds before resuming (Better Living Through Chemistry) simply makes you smile. Who does that? Strange angular riffs, off kilter tempos, off kilter band name…. I’m all over the place here - let’s rank the albums.
8. Era Vulgaris (2007) Man I hate to start this list with an album I don’t love. It’s the only one I would say this about. It starts off strong and the first 5 tracks are worthy - not their very best but still really good. The highlight is the epic Misfit Love - by far the best track on the album. After that it goes downhill… Run Pig Run, River In The Road, and Battery Acid are unlistenable. They might be the only 3 QOTSA songs I can’t listen to. Suture Up Your Future and Make It Wit Chu are just boring and 3’s and 7’s is the only winner on the back half. The next QOTSA album wouldn’t appear for 6 years if you don’t count Them Crooked Vultures with Dave Grohl and John Paul Jones which basically sounds like a QOTSA album and a really good one at that - even though it’s obvious from my earlier attempt that their material kind of defies description.
7. Villains (2017) When I originally did this ranking this was the most recent QOTSA album and this review started like this: “The latest album as of this ranking and while they are due for another they get a pass I suppose… there was a pandemic after all and Josh Homme has been involved in a lot of personal stuff - drugs, alcohol, divorce, restraining orders - oy vey. But I digress.”
***Update - all of those things show up in spades on the next album In Times New Roman which enters this ranking at #4 down below… Let’s now get back to the rest of the Villains review!
Villians is a really good record. Let’s start with what feels like the centerpiece, the penultimate track The Evil Has Landed. Not the longest track on the album but feels like the most epic. It starts with a beckoning to “come close….” before taking you on a twisted rollercoaster of riffage and rhythm that worms its way deep into your skull before announcing “here we come…” in a final straightforward rush warning you to “get out of the way…” before closing the album with Villains Of Circumstance - a decent but not great comedown. The thing that keeps this LP from being further up this list is I guess the overall feel is slightly subdued (?). The material is still fantastic but I think a lack of overall muscle leaves it feeling just the slightest bit……slight. And yet it’s really not - it’s still really good. This is one of those lists that could trigger someone simply because something has to be 1st and something has to be 6th. I don’t suspect I’ll get a lot of push back on my pick for last place but who knows… As for the rest of Villains there are some really good tracks like Feet Don’t Fail Me which starts the album off with a bang and keeps it going with The Way You Used To Do. Also kudos to the bizarre Un-Reborn Again with a pretty funny lifting of a line from the Georgia Satellites classic Keep Your Hands To Yourself.
6. Like Clockwork (2013) The album that preceded Villains feels like it’s of a piece with its successor. I give it a slight edge over Villains just because I think the songs are just slightly stronger. There isn’t an epic like The Evil Has Landed, but the I-don’t-give-an-f hedonistic manifesto of Smooth Sailing is so over the top awesome with a declaration like “I blow my load over the status quo here we go” that you don’t know whether to be inspired or scared - or a little of both. What a song. Plenty of signature QOTSA creepiness abounds here right from the get with the sloooow groove stomp and the initial request of “If life is but a dream….WAKE ME!!!” in the opener Keep Your Eyes Peeled. Rife with “Vampyres” that haunt and make one question existence (Homme almost died from a lack of oxygen from a routine knee surgery and The Vampyre of Time and Memory was apparently the first song he wrote following that experience), delusions (Kalopsia), broken relationships - with friends and possibly drugs (Fairweather Friends), and ultimately resignation with Homme singing “Not everything that goes around comes back around you know? One thing is clear: It's all down hill from here” to close it out in the title track. Great album.
5. Songs For The Deaf (2002) This album takes me back to Atlanta in a very visceral way from when I was training down there for one of my corporate dead-end jobs, and the LINEUP in the band for this one was Josh Homme, long time partner in crime / maniac going back to the founding of Kyuss Nick Oliveri (this was actually Oliveri’s last album with QOTSA as a member of the band), and……..Dave Grohl and Mark Lanegan (actually the second QOTSA album he appears on)! Not to mention Alain Johannes and Natasha Schneider as contributors - I saw them (as the band Eleven) open for Soundgarden back in 1994 in Cleveland. Just an incredible array of talent in the studio for this one. A loose concept album that parodies an evil radio station of sorts, it kicks off with one of my favorite songs by this band You Think I Ain’t Worth A Dollar But I Feel Like A Millionaire which appeared in a different version on The Desert Sessions (an even looser collective ongoing project spanning over 20 years) Vol. 5-6 three years earlier. This is what the kids today would call a BANGER lol… Starting off at a reduced volume as the “radio DJ” Kip Casper introduces the album, it kicks in like a cannon shot with Oliveri’s screaming vocals. THE most aggressive flat out ass kicking QOTSA song in existence. No One Knows follows which is the biggest “hit” for the band and their most well known song - it’s worthy of that mantle and includes a powerhouse performance by Grohl. A Song For The Dead is also a total showcase for Grohl as he provides one of the best air drumming opportunities ever laid down with fills that lead into this rollicking jam that also includes amazing distorted vocals by Lanegan. A prime example of the complete deconstruction of verse-chorus-verse in a way few bands can pull off like these guys can. And just when you think the song is over they hit you with an assault coda with Grohl just destroying everything in sight. Wow. There are plenty of other of jams here like the pulverizing hypnosis of Song For The Deaf, taking the goofy Gary Glitter song Rock and Roll Part II and basically reworking it into a twisted insane metal stomp with Do It Again, the QOTSA calling card spookiness of God Is On The Radio, and the deliberately slow alternating delicate and bottom heavy crush of The Sky Is Fallin’. The highs on this album might be their highest - it’s just that there are a handful of tunes I don’t entirely love that keep it from the top half such as Go With The Flow, Gonna Leave You, Another Love Song and Mosquito Song. They’re just average for me…
4. In Times New Roman (2023) QOTSA returned after their longest break between albums that included a ton of turmoil in leader Josh Homme’s life to reclaim all of the iconic and wonderful weirdness that makes them them. Overall I find this album to be slightly tighter than usual - there is only one song that barely crosses the 5 minute mark until the epic-twisted-Rocky-Mountain-Way-esque stomp of Straight Jacket Fitting that closes the album at 6:45 before the 2 1/2 minute acoustic outro that closes the proceedings, but it doesn’t suffer as a result. And the whole album generally rocks which is great, and while much of their creepy mellow material is fantastic, it feels good to hear the energy here and the songs are really solid - the first single Emotion Sickness is the 9th track of 10 which is kinda cool in and of itself and I love the soaring “Baby don’t care for me - had to let her go-ohhhhh!” chorus. Lots of autobiographical lyrics throughout from a guy who went through divorce, rehab, mutual accusations of domestic abuse and restraining orders with his ex, and cancer… And the tension in the vitriol he’s spitting right from the get makes for some deliciously wicked jams with plenty of sarcastic plays on words starting with the opener Obscenery and not letting up with the lyric in the second track Paper Machete “You think you’re brave? All the plans you made behind my back and from far away? Truth is, face to face you’re a coward - sharp as a paper machete.” So while I thoroughly enjoyed the prior two LPs this one overall just generally feels like a return to form. Homme had been through the ringer prior to this album and some of it was certainly self-inflicted. But he seems to have come out the other end in one piece - at least creatively. That’s undeniable.
3. Queens Of The Stone Age (1998) Arriving 3 years after the final Kyuss album, the debut from Queens Of The Stone Age feels slightly transitional only in that it’s more consistently heavy throughout the whole thing than subsequent releases, but that’s also what makes it so good. And that’s NOT to say that the heaviest QOTSA is the best QOTSA by any means. It still clearly doesn’t sound like a Kyuss album - much of the weirdness shows up here and it’s definitely a new direction - it absolutely sounds like a QOTSA album listening to it now. The first three rockers (Regular John, Avon and If Only) are all really solid - great tunes. Then the uncoventional stuff kicks in that serves notice that this is going to be different. The 10,000-ton bone rattling Walkin’ On The Sidewalks with the repetitious and tuneless extended outro riff that kicks your ass, followed by the extreme weirdness (in the best way) of You Would Know. Now we’re really in new territory. How To Handle A Rope contains one of the band’s finest metal riffs, while Mexicola seems like a companion tune to Walkin’ On The Sidewalks and almost as potent. You Can’t Quit Me Baby is an epic - more groovy than heavy - so good…. the type of repetitious groove you don’t want to end and yet end it must as Homme destroys it by methodically cranking up the speed just after the 5 minute mark until the thing unravels completely. One thing I guess I never realized is that while I was aware that there were no other lead vocals on the album beside Homme’s, Oliveri didn’t actually join to be a member of QOTSA until just before the album was released. So Oliveri actually isn’t on this album at all - Homme handles almost all the instruments here except drums. Drums are handled by Alfredo Hernandez who was in the final Kyuss lineup - this was his only QOTSA LP. The album closes out with the pounding Give The Mule What He Wants and the only mellow tune on the album in the closer I Was A Teenage Hand Model.
2. Rated R (2000) The sophomore album that put QOTSA on the map. All the music magazines were writing about them with this one and this is the one where they came into their own with many of the hallmarks of the many guests and styles that would mark the rest of their albums. Mark Lanegan and Nick Oliveri make their first appearances as well. The album starts with the crazy Feel Good Hit Of The Summer with a lyrical list of repeated drugs “Nicotene Valium Vicodin Marijuana Ecstacy and Alcohol!!!” over and over that somehow is catchy as HELL and even Rob Halford himself contributed backing vocals on the last verse! He happened to be recording in the studio next door. Most of the album is about drugs actually, with one of the lone exceptions being the second track and lead single The Lost Art Of Keeping A Secret. Leg Of Lamb feels like it’s of a piece with You Would Know from the previous album - weird and amazing. The 4th song Auto Pilot is the first lead vocal by someone other than Homme with Oliveri singing it and it’s probably the most low key song he sings going forward, but it’s a cool vibe. Better Living Through Chemistry is the LP’s centerpiece and totally spooky - a great song to listen to around Halloween and it contains the bizarre 40 second pause at the 1:45 mark I mentioned at the beginning with a droning sound that is shattered by a crashing interlude and strange “ahhhhhs” until the song itself finally resumes at the 4:17 mark like nothing happened… The quality doesn’t end there - the acid trip gone wrong of Monster In The Parasol, the bizarre and thrilling under-two-minute manic aggression of Quick And To The Pointless with Oliveri being…..Oliveri (dude got arrested after one of their gigs in Brazil for performing naked). Lanegan shows up on mic next with In The Fade - a mellow vibe that gets a little heavier in the chorus but it’s Lanegan’s unmistakeable rasp that is perfect for this one ending with a fun little Feel Good Hit Of The Summer reprise... This is the album that leaves behind the heaviness as the primary tactic - there is enough heavy to remind you but this never feels quite like stoner metal. The album finishes with more Oliveri madness with the off-kilter Tension Head, a brief acoustic instrumental and then I Think I’ve Lost My Headache which seems designed to finish you off with a……headache, but in a hilarious way as the weird opening motif of the song comes back to be repeated ad nauseum for 5 minutes getting faster and deconstructed until we’re left with a couple horns. Brilliant!
1. Lullabies To Paralyze (2005) This was an unlikely triumph in my eyes at the time. To me Nick Oliveri had been such an important element in this band - like he and Homme were THE guys, but Homme in reality was always the leader and as I mentioned earlier I wasn’t even aware that Oliveri wasn’t on the first album. So when I read he’d been fired from the band I was skeptical about the next album, especially since he handled vocals on a handful of my favorite QOTSA albums at this point. Who was going to bring the crazy? Well I was pleasantly blown away when they came roaring back, delivering their true masterpiece without him. I shouldn’t have doubted Josh for a second. The album starts with Mark Lanegan’s only lead vocal on the haunting intro of This Lullaby and then it kicks in with the rollicking roar of Medication - a great start. This album also marks the appearance of new member Troy Van Leeuwen whom I just saw replace Dave Navarro in Jane’s Addiction this year while Navarro recovers from long Covid. Dude is a monster guitarist. Everybody Knows That You Are Insane starts to bring in the weird as a track that seems to have mutliple personalities with the speedy choruses that just take off after the mellow verses, followed by the swing of Tangled Up In Plaid which is fantastic. But where the album really picks up the pace is with the spooky stomp of Burn The Witch complete with a Billy Gibbons guest guitar solo that you know is Billy Gibbons immediately. So cool! Burn The Witch was released as the 3rd single from the album and it’s followed by singles 2 and 1 In My Head and Little Sister. In My Head sounds like a single with the catchy chorus that may be about a girl or a drug - hard to tell…
I keep on playin’ our favorite song
I turn it up while you're gone
It's all I got when you're in my head
And you're in my head so I need it.
Little Sister was recorded in the studio live in one take which is pretty awesome - great fast paced jam with a fantastic guitar solo. I Never Came is a cool album track which dials back the energy a tad before the mammoth Someone’s In The Wolf. Someone’s In The Wolf is the centerpiece of the album for me. An epic that really encompasses the best elements of this band. A song like no other really. A crazy manic rhythm and hook that just worms its way into your head, a one thousand ton intro riff that is repeated several times throughout the track, plenty of overall spookiness and a truly weird interlude in the middle. Just incredible to come up with art like this. If the album ended right here it would be a masterpiece but there are still 5 tracks to go. The dirge of The Blood Is Love is pulverizing and might be the only song I don’t LOVE on the album. But it closes out with 4 tracks that could be the 4 best in a row on any QOTSA album. Skin On Skin is one of the more direct songs you’ll ever hear about sex this side of Prince almost to the point of parody - but it’s awesome. Just deliciously dirty, and it’s followed by the 180° counterpoint of Broken Box - also a very direct, but if Skin on Skin says I want you then Broken Box says F-you. What a great song… The last two are mellow and more of the spooky vibe - first with the howl-at-the-moon fun of “You Got A Killer Scene There, Man…” and wrapping up the proceedings with the intoxicating crawl of Long Slow Goodbye. What an album. Clearly their peak in my book.
So what do YOU think? Do you agree with this order? If you haven’t listened to any of these but this article inspires you to do it I want to know - leave your comments below!
M10 Social is owned by Doug Cohen in West Bloomfield, MI and provides social media training and digital marketing services from the Frameable Faces Photography studio Doug owns with his wife Ally. He can be reached there at tel:248-790-7317, by mobile at tel:248-346-4121 or via email at mailto:doug@frameablefaces.com. You can follow Doug’s band Vintage Playboy at their Facebook page here.
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